Run Quake 3 at high (120) fps on your Nano!


Requirements: high framerate monitor (DisplayPort recommended), Jetson Nano, Quake 3 CD or sufficient google skills.

First we need our Q3 CD mounted and the files copied to our home directory, another easy way is to purchase through Steam and navigate to <directory of steam/steamapps/common/Quake 3> from a Windows computer and copy your baseq3 folder to a different dir under your home dir on Nano. In this example I have copied the files from Steam on a FAT32 thumb drive and I am using /q3paks/ under my home directory.


cd ~
mkdir q3paks;cd q3paks;mkdir baseq3;cd baseq3
cp /media/sda1/baseq3/* ~/q3paks/baseq3
sudo apt install game-data-packager
game-data-packager -i quake3 --package quake3-data ~/q3paks/

[[[ Note: baseq3 folder must be all lowercase, AS WELL AS the pakX.pk3 filenames inside the dir ]]]
It should download, extract, and install in minutes and it should tell you where it installed. If it doesn't launch with the 'quake3' command or 'ioquake3' command then it should launch from within the directory it installed to.

Next, you will have to kill ibus-daemon as root. If you do not do this step (at least on the current Jetson Nano SDK), the game will not run at all, so do this. You can disable this permanently by typing

sudo sysctl disable ibus-daemon

or temporarily

sudo killall ibus-daemon

Make sure quake plays at this point. Your screen may look weird. You can pull down the console (~ button) and type

r_mode -1
r_customwidth 1920
r_customheight 1080
com_maxfps 220
writeconfig autoexec
exit (hit y to quit)

The next time you run the game, it should come up normally and look awesome. It's still locked at 60 fps though. Let's work 120 fps magic!

xrandr is the magic 120 fps enabling command, type it by itself to see what the capabilities of your current monitor are. Again DisplayPort is advised as you can get 144 FPS, but 120 FPS is possible with HDMI I believe.

If it says 'DP-0 connected' Look for the line that has 1920x1080 and make sure it has 144.00 or 120.00 (or both) there. If it says 'HDMI-0' make sure it has 120.00.
For DisplayPort use:

xrandr --output DP-0 --mode 1920x1080 --rate 144.00
for supported 144hz monitor or

xrandr --output DP-0 --mode 1920x1080 --rate 120.00
for supported 120hz monitor

For HDMI use:

xrandr --output HDMI-0 --mode 1920x1080 --rate 120.00

Now run Quake 3 like Normal.

And that's it. This is 120FPS gaming on a $99 Jetson Nano, and it should even work on the $59 2GB. Happy fragging!